PROFILES IN ACHIEVEMENT
A rare earth processing facility will open in Saskatchewan in 2022
The Saskatchewan Research Council (SRC) is Canada’s second largest research and technology organization.
The Company
With nearly 300 employees, $91 million in annual revenue and nearly 75 years of experience, SRC provides services and products to its 1,500 clients in 27 countries around the world.
The Achievement
In the coming decade, the need for rare earth elements (REEs) will increase many-fold due to their importance in high-growth technology areas such as wind turbines and electric cars.
Canadian rock formations hold 12 per cent of the world’s rare earth elements measured resources. But currently, no REEs are being processed in Canada due to both a Chinese monopoly as supplier and end user, as well as the lack of a fully developed supply chain in North America.
SRC is looking to change that by securing an early and important piece of the supply chain for industry – a rare earth processing facility. The $35-million facility was announced in the summer of 2020 by the Government of Saskatchewan with completion slated for the fall of 2022.
The facility, a first-of-its-kind in Canada, will begin to establish a REE technology hub in Saskatchewan, forming an industry model for future commercial REE initiatives and supply chain development.
A key element of the facility is a commercial processing plant, which will include concentration and separation stages and treat monazite sands at approximately 60-per-cent concentration. Monazite is a source of mainly so called “light” REEs which are some of the critical elements for the permanent magnets used in clean technologies. SRC will work with the mining industry to secure this feedstock from across Saskatchewan, Canada and internationally.
An intermediate concentrate of mixed rare earth carbonates will be produced from the monazite processing unit and further processed in a separation unit to produce separated rare earth oxides, as the market requires.
These will be sold by SRC and further refined and processed to provide the inputs that original equipment manufacturers require.
The Team
This work is being led by a team of engineers, scientists and technologists within SRC including Muhammad Imran, P.Eng., Jack Zhang, P.Eng., Baodong Zhao, P.Eng., Bryan Schreiner, P.Eng., P.Geo., Dennis Wang, P.Eng., Tim Oleniuk, P.Eng., Augustine Adeoye, Engineer-In-Training, Jinhe Shu, Engineer-In-Training, Lucia Xia, Engineer-In-Training, Sheldon Hill, P.Eng., Dave Williams, P.Eng., Anton Farber, P.Eng., Graham Epp, Engineer-In-Training, Tony Kaminski, P.Eng., and Cole Gunderson, Engineer-In-Training.